American Workers Speak—and Want Access to Collective Bargaining and New Options for Voice and Representation at Work

By Alex Hertel-Fernandez, William Kimball and Thomas Kochan

What kinds of voice and representation do American workers want on the job? Our recent national survey experiment answers this question, and in doing so lays out a clear and ambitious reform agenda for the next president and Congress, as well as strategies for unions and worker advocates.

We asked a nationally representative sample of more than 4,000 American workers in fall 2018 to choose what forms of representation they thought best fit their needs. The options offered reflected the active debates underway among academics, labor and workforce leaders, social commentators, and politicians about how to best reform the nation’s outmoded labor policies in order to fill the void created by the long-term decline in union representation. Here’s what workers are telling the experts they want.

Above all, workers expressed a strong interest in gaining access to collective bargaining and to new forms of representation that are common in Europe but not supported by American labor law. The new forms include worker representation on corporate boards of directors, organization-wide labor management advisory councils, and informal workplace groups that focus on improving how work gets done. And, given that mobility across jobs has become more important in recent years, workers expressed a strong interest in organizations that provide portable health insurance, retirement, training, jobless benefits, and other labor market services. In essence, workers today want organizations that provide both collective bargaining at firm or industry levels—the staple of American unions—and new options that strengthen their voice in corporate decision-making and support them across their entire careers as they move from one job to another.

The results are a blueprint both for policy action in the next Congress and Administration and for unions and the range of new forms of worker advocacy that have sprung up in recent years.

If government leaders listen to the workforce, they will fix the basic and well-documented problems with the existing New Deal–era National Labor Relations Act and open up that law to support the new options workers favor for a voice at work and in organizational governance and provision of labor market services.

If union and worker advocacy leaders are listening, they will reinforce efforts to work together to expand collective bargaining coverage and to provide all workers with a voice in shaping how they work and in the key organizational decisions that affect their long-term welfare and security.

Our survey was conducted well before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread calls for racial justice that emerged during the past year. Nevertheless, we believe these developments make all the more urgent the need for policy actions and organizational innovations documented in our survey.

The COVID crisis lays bare the need for stronger unions and direct forms of worker voice to ensure everyone has a voice in determining and monitoring the safety conditions at their workplace and to make the temporary and partial emergency provisions for paid sick and family leave the norm, not the temporary exception, across US workplaces.

The Black Lives Matter movement’s passionate calls for racial justice, moreover, demonstrate the need for new forums for groups of workers to have a direct and strong voice in shaping and enforcing organizational “diversity and inclusion” policies and practices without risk of retaliation for demanding immediate and decisive actions to combat racism.

American workers are speaking clearly through our survey data and their direct actions. Now it is up to leaders in government, labor, and civil society to listen and act accordingly. The time for a transformational new labor policy has come, and the blueprint for what to do could not be clearer.

Article details

What Forms of Representation Do American Workers Want? Implications for Theory, Policy, and Practice
Alex Hertel-Fernandez, William Kimball, Thomas Kochan
First Published September 24, 2020 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0019793920959049
ILR Review

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